Posted
by
timothy
on Monday June 08, 2009 @05:09AM
from the zehr-zehr-nett-aus dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Netbooknews.com has scored a video of a 7-inch Google Android netbook from a company called GNB during Computex. The device is powered by a Freescale iMX31 CPU. The design might not be to everyone's taste, but it could turn out to be a super cheap Android netbook."

Unless you just want to stick to VIM (or emacs), a 7 inch screen screws up a lot of user interfaces. My eeePC has dialog boxes in pre-loaded software that can't be "OK'd" because the buttons are off the screen.:(

I have found with Gnome though at least, that you can't push a window up past the top of the screen, which has on one occassion been a huge pain when a massive unresizeable window opened with the next button at the bottom and off the screen. You can though of course use alt + a suitable letter to activate the buttons usually, but that requires knowing the correct char.

The bottom of the window?? Are you retarded? "Guys, I can't get click anything in the bottom of this window." "My advice to you: click something in the bottom of the window. thxbai you need not pay me."

Until recently (Intrepid?) it didn't work - the window manager would definitely refuse to hide the title bar off screen. You could draw the window all you wanted down, left, right, but up - nope, the title bar must remain visible.

How about you read posts, think about what they are trying to tell you and then, maybe, post a reply?

In any windowsmanager I know you can hold down the ALT key, and drag the windows by drag-clicking ANYWHERE within the window.GPs tip to click the bottom didn't mean the exact bottom of the window, but rather the lower part of the windows (so that you have enough space to move the window far enough up.

True, but it works fine without Compiz (Metacity I guess). I doubt that a 7" netbook has the hardware to support compositing anyway, so Compiz would be a really particularly bad choice for window manager on this device.

Actually, there's no stupidity here. In gnome (at least on debian) the default is to stop when the top of the window hits the top of the screen. Regardless of how you are manipulating the window/where your mouse is/whatever. Of course, I think there's some obscure gconf option to change the behavior.

If the window is already at the top of the screen, and you initiate a move action via the window-decoration context menu (right click on the border, or alt+space), you can move windows beyond the top of the screen - provided you don't first move the window downward.

Unless you just want to stick to VIM (or emacs), a 7 inch screen screws up a lot of user interfaces.

Or possibly you mean switch away from vim or emacs?;-)

Seriously, I'd think that in a lot of cases, a small screen is actually more appropriate. Whenever I see someone using Outlook in full screen on a giant monitor, or using their browser in the same manner, I have to chuckle at the absurdity of it. You figure the ideal width of 74 characters or so for maximum readability and comprehension, but the latest and greatests in technology brings us mile-wide sentences?

Or, as this is a tech site, how useful is it when trying to troubleshoot a system where the BIOS setup, boot messages and everything else appears in giant poster-sized fonts? No one's arms are long enough for that nonsense.

I don't know what kind of person is representative of the netbook market, but I'd think that the majority of the great unwashed masses expect their computers to function like an appliance. A netbook seems to meet that requirement. So if checking email and browsing the web is all most people do, how big a screen do they really need?

Is that width (74 characters) really ideal or just some relic of old printers' limitations or some such?

There's a reason that even with today's digital typesetting, printed newspapers have five or six columns of text and not one column running across the whole page. On a reasonably-wide column (30em to 40em, or 60 to 80 characters), your eyes can find the next line while your brain is processing the last words on the current line. Otherwise, hunting for the next line interrupts your train of thought.

On a reasonably-wide column (30em to 40em, or 60 to 80 characters), your eyes can find the next line while your brain is processing the last words on the current line. Otherwise, hunting for the next line interrupts your train of thought.

Actually, with a reasonably narrow column, an experienced reader can take a line at a single glance, and read through a column without moving their eyes sideways.

... printed newspapers have five or six columns of text and not one column running across the whole page

God help us when that "dying industry" is replaced with on-line content. As it is now, I mostly dump pages I'm interested in reading using lynx, and while that's hardly ideal, it'll do until the dust settles in the Kindle arena.

IIRC, there was a UK newspaper that offered a feature that would display the article in multi-column format in a new window. Immensely readable, but the extra clicks made it anno

Vim on such a machine can be very nice though. Most of the use I get from my Nokia 770 is running Vim. I can fit it and a folding keyboard in a couple of pockets, and I've then got a machine I can write articles on wherever I happen to be.

The size of the screen has nothing to do with that, it's from the resolution. The first generation EeePC's have resolution of 800x480 pixels, most interfaces are designed for at least 800x600 usually more like 1024x768

The Fujitsu U820 has a 5.6" screen with a resolution of 1280x800. It's much smaller than the EeePC's display but there's a whole lot more screen space.

Android is optimized for small screens and low-powered devices, with no unwanted background processes.Have you tried running Ubuntu (non-netbook edition) on a 10.2" screen at 1024x600 screen? Most apps simply don't fit on the screen, alt+mouse_drag only moves windows down, not up, meaning jumping through a lot of hoops simply to press OK in a dialog because it is below the screen.

Android is optimized for small screens and low-powered devices, with no unwanted background processes.Have you tried running Ubuntu (non-netbook edition) on a 10.2" screen at 1024x600 screen?

FWIW I ran Mandrake with KDE on a Sony PictureBook C1XD (it was a pre Crusoe model, with a 400MHz PII) at 1024x480 for quite a while. Worked fine. Even back then (from 2000 to 2004 maybe, I didn't have to resize or drag around that many dialogs. The machine is still around. I have to update it (it has to boot from a floppy though, stupid hardware design) one of these days. I'm sure it'll still do fine with current software (well maybe not with digiKam or Blender).

Disable window effects and then it will work. I've never had this problem on Ubuntu with Gnome but I always disable the effects as I don't think they add anything of value especially on my netbook. I use the alt+mouse all the time with it for the very reasons already mentioned here.

I run Ubuntu (non-netbook edition) on my Acer Aspire One with its 8.9" 1024x600 screen. Many apps fit, some don't, alt+mouse_drag works in both directions (required a GConf tweak to make it work with Compiz, but it worked as expected with Metacity). That being said, more pixels would be greatly appreciated

If you want to run ubuntu on a netbook specifically an aspireone but a lot applies to netbooks in generalmay i recommend this page. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne [ubuntu.com] There are similar pages but if your Netbook hasn't got a page you can easily start one contribute the bits you know and others will add the bits you don't.

To remove the y constraint (allowing you to move your windows up and not just down) enter this in a terminal

I would use Linux4One except that the kernel is missing a lot of useful stuff such as usb-to-serial drivers. By the time I installed enough software that I could compile modules I might as well have just installed Ubuntu and fixed the minor issues with it. My other complaint was that the kernel source was very hard to get so making drivers was exceedingly difficult. So much so that I went back to Ubuntu on my Aspire One.

Have you tried running Ubuntu (non-netbook edition) on a 10.2" screen at 1024x600 screen? Most apps simply don't fit on the screen, alt+mouse_drag only moves windows down, not up, meaning jumping through a lot of hoops simply to press OK in a dialog because it is below the screen.

I have, and it was also slow on Aspire One (512MB), that's probably why they had Ubuntu NBR (Net Book Remix) [ubuntu.com] ready very soon. I like it. Great for reading pdf's and such or testing networks...

Ubuntu NBR seems to be missing some packages, like bash command autocompletion or NTFS-3G. I spent half an hour trying to copy stuff from an external NTFS-formatted HDD before realizing this. Although NBR is indeed a very nice distro, I wish they removed only the packages that were 100% not wanted on a netbook.

BTW, why I need Android (roughly saying, a limited Linux) on my netbook if there is a regular Linux?..

Well, it means that you'll be running a GUI designed to run on low-powered computers with very small touch screens, and have access to an App Store full of apps designed to run on low-powered computers with small touch screens.

With a regular Linux - you won't. You'll be running a full-strength GUI with maybe a small-screen-friendly launcher grafted on and applications designed for full-strength PCs. If you're really, really lucky someone will have checked that all the crucial configuration dialogues actua

Then you're missing the point of the "smartbook" idea: they're a better way of running the sort of custom-designed applications you see on the iPhone/Android rather than a worse way of running [Open]Office.

That aspect of the original EEE whithered on the vine somewhat in favour of the netbook as a small, cheap but fully capable PC laptop.

Unfortunately, the netbook makers saw Linux as a way of getting a cheap off-the-peg operating syste

Note that the i.MX3 series is very old (in CPU terms). The current generation, the i.MX5, is based on the Cortex A8 and is a very nice chip capable of, among other things, running Flash and encoding H.264 in real time. The i.MX3 is an older generation (there was no i.MX4) based on an ARM11 core. It does have the VFP (vector / floating point) coprocessor, but does not support the NEON SIMD instruction set. It is likely to be significantly slower than a 600MHz A8 as found in something like the OMAP3, and a lot slower than the 1GHz A8 found in the i.MX5. The i.MX3 didn't have an on-die GPU, so this may be using a simple frame buffer while most A8 SoCs (OMAP3, i.MX5, etc) include an OpenGL 2.0 ES-compatible GPU.

The A8 is currently in the process of being superseded by the Cortex A9, which includes a slightly improved pipeline, out-of-order execution, and support for up to 4 cores on a single die. ARM started licensing it a year ago, and SoCs based on the core (e.g. nVidia's Tegra) are beginning to appear.

I evaluated a freescale board for a major computer manufacture and we ended up deciding not to go with it. Sure its a fast ARM chip and the video processor supports multimedia acceleration but the resolution is tiny. The max resolution when we looked at it was 1024x768(I beleive this was it, we needed much higher). So don't except to be able to hook these things up to an external monitor unless they go with a different video card.

The good news about all these arm manufactures coming out with netbooks is they really try to support the Linux community and are actively submitting patches.

The cpu is relatively slow, most users in this range run only one app full-screen at any one time and 1024x768 is perfectly fine on a 15-21" monitor.

Don't get all pixel-snobby here, or I'll be forced to mention my mis-spent youth programming Coco II games and the oddball CGA resolutions like 160x100 - which, coincidentally, is about the resolution of my basic Samsung phone at present.

So I'll do you a deal - once your phone is routinely capable of 1024x768 o

First of all, it's a real netbook, with keyboard and touchpad (I wish it had the nipple, but ok) and all the connectors one can find on a number of (intel-based) netbooks. So this is good - this is the first real ARM-based netbook I have seen so far.

I like the weight - 650g! Amazingly light.

But battery consumption is not good. It will work for 2.5 hours on one charge. That's pathetic.

It could be the screen, the wireless card, the ethernet chip, the disk drive, or some messed up code that keeps the CPU far too busy for no particular reason whatsoever. For example, my wife's Acer Aspire One has a very low power CPU attached at the hip to a power sucking memory controller. Go figure.

Yeah- two design features I don't get are the stupid touchpads and crappy batteries. Netbook manufacturers are you listening- DITCH THE DAMN TOUCHPADS. Hardly anyone uses them- it just ends up taking up very valuable keyboard real estate and periodically moving my cursor around in unexpected ways. I hate these damn things.

Secondly- 2.5hrs may be enough for regular laptop users who just use the thing as an overly expensive, delicate desktop anyway but netbooks are actually meant to be carried around and as s

Nice to see another "proper" netbook being brought to market - 7" devices are what started the ball rolling. Ultra-portability combined with a cheap price is what defines a netbook. The term has become so diluted that it's being applied to 12" machines, and machines which cost as much as a traditional laptop.

I've done quite a bit of work on ARM processors without an operating system and limited work using ARM9 devices with a Gentoo based distro and something I've wondered is if under Linux there's a way to conveniently enable low-power mode essentially putting the processor to sleep while allowing certain peripherals to remain running? An obvious example would be leaving the LCD controller running to display an e-book page while the CPU was in sleep mode or running at a low clock rate until a button is pressed. I know how to do that when programming most ARM CPUs natively, but are there any attempts out there to standardize some low power behaviour for the kernel?

It could really help some of these devices that are no doubt often used for a single task at a time. Perhaps it could even be in the form of some sort of system call that allowed a process to request the minimum slice of CPU time per second and wake-up latency required per task and the scheduler could determine the required clock frequency and possible sleep time required to fulfil the requirements of every process. Just seems to me it could be a way to extend the battery life and take advantange of some of the amazing low-power modes of newer ARM cores in a standard manner.

It's called a CnMBook. Have a look at this page [194.150.201.35]. (Yeah, I know - bare IP address looks suspicious. I don't think the manufacturer's quite got the hang of this Internet thing. Google is your friend if you don't trust me.) It's sold under a lot of different names.

The specs are similar to the gadget on show here. Mine has a slower CPU, less memory and no touch screen. Battery life is 2.5-3 hours. The OS is a heavily-customised Debian. I love the small size and low weight. I can fit it into my coat pocket. The screen is nice and clear. The keyboard is reasonable, but is prone to registering phantom keystrokes - running vi is therefore not recommended. I don't know if it's just mine that does this, or if it's a design flaw.

The main app I run on it is a text editor. It's a bit slow for anything else.

I paid Â£139 for mine just before Christmas. I bought it from Maplin, who are now selling them off for Â£99 - probably because they were evasive about it not running Windows. They now have a Windows CE version of it, which has "Windows CE" in the product name.

Yeah, they might not understand the Internet, but they understand their obligations under the GPL:-)

The CPU in mine is a 400MHz MIPS clone. No idea how that compares with an x86 or ARM device. It has 128MB of RAM and 2GB of on-board flash. It has an SD slot and 3 USB sockets, so you could plug 4GB into each of those, for a (rather unwieldy) 16GB of additional storage.

It takes about 2 minutes to boot into an X desktop. More annoying is that it doesn't have a suspend or hibernate mode - or if it does, I haven't found it. It has a key with "Zzz" written on it, but this just switches off the screen backlight. Still, it does what I bought it for.

That looks like a rebadged SkyTone Alpha 400 [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. the World's Cheapest Laptop (it hit the news here a while back). There's about a dozen different products based on it for sale.

They look fascinating, and at some point I want to get one. I can think of lots of things to do with one, from using it as a cheap web browsing appliance to a lightweight mini server to a serial console to an automation computer. Plus, MIPS is cool. Skytone appear to be working on successor models to the 400, but they have ARM p

There's a great user forum for this class of device here [ark2webdesign.co.uk]. One of the users, Wicknix, has created his own distro called 3MX, and has just completed a build of Debian Etch (for MIPSEL). I use the Elonex ONEt version with the default Linux OS and find it a lot of fun.

Thanks for that. I've had a quick look around it just now, and I'll definitely be spending some more time there.

I replaced the default distro with Xenium, as I wanted something a bit more familiar. Sadly, the guy who created it looks to have lost interest in it, so it's good to see someone else picking up the torch.

Even when I bought it, it wasn't the best value for money. The attractions were the small size and low weight, and the fact it ran Linux out of the box.

To me, this machine is essentially a portable electric typewriter. I write novels (as if you can't tell from my sig!) and I want something I can use for writing when I'm away from home. For years, I used a Psion 5mx, which I eventually gave up on when the touch screen stopped being touch-sensitive.

And an AZERTY keyboard makes sense if you're...um, French, I think. Or live in a French-speaking country.

Hunt & peck works surprisingly well for a large number of people. Most people I know don't touch-type but achieve reasonable typing speeds. Even with thumb-typing on a cell phone with fully keyboard, a reasonable speed can be achieved without much effort as long as the layout is one you are familiar with.